Rewind to 1960s, America was witnessing Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. “I have a dream.” pronounced the black leader and those four magical words sowed the seeds of a vision that inspired millions of African-Americans, and the young Obama was just one among them.

The charismatic 47-year-old Barack Hussain Obama, was inaugurated 44th President of the most powerful nation of world on January 20, 2009. This was not just the usual transition of power but an event that had a potential of transforming not only America but the world too. The inaugural had a special message that personified the fulfillment of hopes and dreams cherished for long by not only the victims of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States of America but also by those who have met such a treatment of social degradation across the length and breath of the planet.

His speech at the grand ceremony struck resonance with the soul of the great message of peace and dignity, of unity of purpose and of a great renewal of values, when he announced that the nation of America is a communion of all races, all religions and all beliefs.   

Family and Personal Life

Obama was born to Stanley Ann Dunham, a European American and Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo, of Kenya in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

His parents separated when he was just two years old. Following divorce, Dunham remarried an Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. Young Obama stayed with his mother and attended local schools in Jakarta, Indonesia where his mother had relocated to after remarrying. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Obama met Michelle Robinson, who later became his wife, when he was employed as an associate at a Chicago law firm. Michelle worked as Obama’s adviser at the firm. After engagement in 1991, they were married on October 3, 1992.

Obama was known as “Barry” in his youth, but asked to be addressed with his given name during his college years.

Political Career

Was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. After the election, he gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He also sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported payday and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.

After reelection to the Illinois Senate in 1998, he continued his reform programs. In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to Bobby Rush.

In January 2003, He became the Chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. During the tenure, he sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of a legislation to monitor racial profiling making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations. Obama was sworn in to the U.S. Senate on January 4, 2005 making himself the fifth African-American Senator in U.S. history, and the third to have been popularly elected. 

On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The site was symbolic because it was where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Throughout the presidential campaign, Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care.

Election Victory                           

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated his republican rival John McCain in perhaps one of the most memorable general elections in US history and became the first African-American to handle the world’s most powerful job. In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama proclaimed that “Change has come to America”.

Great reforms test the pulse of time. If the grand vision of Obama strikes the right chord, the new age as envisioned by him will herald in a great transformation which generations to come will scarce to forget.